Stone Kingdoms (34 page)

‘How do they treat you?'

‘I've been treated worse. They don't come round every day and beat you with rubber truncheons, if that's what you mean.'

‘I didn't mean that.' Then I don't know what to say. At the other table the girl has stood up, and is grabbing the child as she hurries to leave. The youth looks embarrassed and folds his arms, then brushes the table with the edge of his hand. The child's car is still on our table, the child is pointing at it, but his mother ignores him as she rushes to the desk with her pass. The child is slipping into panic. As we stare at the car an officer comes and lifts it then gives it to the child, who grabs it tightly, and then the same officer comes and takes the prisoner away. Daniel exchanges the slightest of nods as he passes.

‘Do you ever go back to Donegal, then?'

‘Sometimes during the holidays. Not as often as I should.'

‘You still think the sky and sea are suffocating you?' he asks, and he's almost smiling.

‘When you don't have to live somewhere, going back isn't too bad.' He half-smiles again, as if I've said something funny. ‘Are you taking any classes, going on with your education?' I ask.

‘
I'm learning hairdressing. It was a toss-up between hairdressing and bricklaying. At least if you become a hairdresser you get to work inside and don't have to stick your hands in cement all day long.'

‘Would you like to be a hairdresser? What about your exams?'

‘What's the point? There was never any point.'

‘You're not going to be here for ever.' I sound like a school teacher. He's playing with me, making me say the predictable, and I can't help it. ‘You talked about going to America.'

‘America?' he says, as if I've just made it up. ‘I'm not going to America. I'm not going anywhere. There's people here who'll look after me now.'

‘Do you believe that, Daniel?' He looks away, stares into one of the mirrors, then drinks from his cup.

‘Do you know what I really hate about this place? It's the wee things. Like the drawers. You have three drawers for your clothes and things and you have to keep everything in the same order, like your socks have to be down the middle of the second drawer. And they inspect it every morning.' He screws up his face as if he can't believe his own words, then half-smiles again.

‘How long will they keep you here?'

‘With good behaviour and remission, about another year.'

I want to say something but don't know how, and he sees it and so he says, ‘Are you still playing those games with the shell?'

‘Not so often. People find it hard. It's always easier to sidestep it, to bottle it as you said.' He nods and stares at me and I feel sick inside, wonder what my voice sounds like. ‘Are we going to talk about it?' He looks away again. I follow his eyes to where the officer sitting at the raised desk watches us without interest.

‘You always want to talk about things,' he says. ‘Why do you always want to talk about things? You think it changes anything, makes things go away?'

‘
I don't know why. Maybe it helps. Makes you feel differently about things.'

‘And that's why you want to talk? You want to hear me say I feel differently about what happened? I suppose it would make you feel better, go home happier.'

I shake my head but know it's the truth. He leans across the table and I smell prison off him.

‘This isn't school, it's not a place where you play games with shells. This is the real world. Do you know anything about the real world?'

His words spit into my face like hail, and each one hurts, and I have to say something to try to stop the sting. ‘I know what happened to those men was terrible. As terrible as all the other things that happen in this country. And I know you couldn't have been a part of it.'

‘Everything's simple to you. You want everything simple like it's those two gangs of kids on that island, and one's led by Ralph and one by Jack and you want to be in Ralph's gang and everybody you don't like is in Jack's.'

‘Maybe it is simple, Daniel.' As soon as I've said it, it sounds stupid, pathetic, but it's too late.

He shakes his head in a way I've seen him do before, as if I'm a child who will never understand, and for a second it looks like he's going to walk away but then he remembers he can't. We sit in silence for a while and everything in the room seems drawn into the mirrors, trapped in their repeated reflections. Words start into my head but they seem feeble and incapable of conveying what I want to say, so I say nothing.

‘What about Sean? What about what they did to him? What about the people that Stone killed?'

I have no answer for him, and just for an instant in the tight hunch of his shoulders and the bite of his voice I see and hear his father, but I try to push the thought away, hold on to something else. Everything floods in – his mother's face against the glass, the girl in the wedding dress, her train caught by the
wind
– but then it collapses into nothingness and I hear only the voice of some young man, a young man without a face, and suddenly I look at Daniel and feel the sickness welling up inside. And I say it in a whisper but loud enough for him to hear,' “Short and sweet, good enough for him.” Is that what you said, Daniel?'

He looks at me and his eyes blink, and for a second I think he's going to say something but the words vanish in his throat. And then he's standing up, raising his arm to the prison officer in the corner, and without looking at me he lifts the book and turns away. But the officer calls him back and points to the two cups on the table and he stands staring for a moment into the officer's eyes. I say his name but he doesn't look at me or speak, just bends to clean the table and drop the cups and book into the bin. I watch him walk away shadowed by the officer, and then there is the rattle of keys and the clunk of the metal gate opening and closing. I never see him again.

I tell Basif enough for him to understand, but he doesn't speak at first and only the smell of the cigar tells me he's still there. I imagine the smoke drifting slowly into the branches of the tree and curling towards the light. I move my head, tilt it slowly upwards, and wait for him to speak.

‘I saw it on TV – the car, the soldiers at the funeral,' he says, but his voice is slower than I know it, opaque, difficult to gauge.

‘I suppose they showed it round the world.'

‘I had forgotten it, but as you told it I started to remember.'

From the room used as a school comes the sound of Nadra's voice, a child breaking into a hollow cough, the clap of hands.

‘Will that do you, Basif?' I ask, turning my face once again to where he's sitting. ‘Will that do for a reason? Part of a reason?'

‘Yes, that'll do. Maybe we have to be old before we can understand all the things that happen to us.'

‘So, Basif,' I say, ‘will you tell me why you're here?' But I
expect
only lightness, a good story that will amuse and change from telling to telling, for I think I know this man I have never seen, and so I tease him with my curiosity. He shifts in his chair and I wait for him to talk of himself.

‘There are many reasons why people come to Africa.' His voice is strangely clouded, moving in some unfamiliar orbit. ‘To help people, of course, and maybe to help themselves too. Sometimes to punish someone else or even themselves. Or to pay the price of something. You understand?' I nod my head, but he pauses a little before he continues. ‘My family live in Beirut. We are Christians, Maronites. Before the fighting Beirut was a very beautiful city, as beautiful as Paris, I think. We had a good life there. My family was rich, we had many businesses, and my father wanted me to run these with my brother, but when I decided to be a doctor he was happy too. I trained in Paris. But I love Lebanon and know I will always go back there.

‘When I was a boy my favourite place was the racecourse. My father had racehorses and sometimes he took me to see them training. I would sit high up on the wall and watch the horses and jockeys. Afterwards he would take me to a restaurant owned by my uncle in the Place des Martyrs, and there were crowds and shops and no one cared who was a Christian or a Muslim. When the war came everything changed, everything was destroyed and the city was divided in two, with Christians in the east and Muslims in the west. Many bad things happened, very bad things, too many to tell. My family supported Bashir Gemayel and the Phalangists, my brothers joined the militia, so when I went to work for the Red Cross things became difficult. Often I worked in the refugee camps with the Palestinians. They couldn't understand this. They have a saying: “One Palestinian in the sea, pollution. All Palestinians in the sea, solution.” We argued, my mother cried, then we didn't see each other very often and it became too dangerous to travel across the city. For a while I worked at a hospital in West Beirut, but then the Israelis invaded in ‘82 and
it
was the end of everything. Arafat and the PLO were surrounded, it was hopeless – they had no choice. The Americans helped negotiate what you call a safe passage, and in August they sailed out of Beirut.' He stops, I hear him exhale in a slow stream. ‘Do you want me to go on? This would be a good place to stop.' There is something in his voice I have never heard before – a nervousness that slows and dulls his voice, makes him cautious about the words he chooses – but I ask him to go on because for the first time I don't know where his words will lead.

‘There were two large refugee camps called Sabra and Shatila. I had worked in both. Very poor places, very primitive – block houses, open sewers and rubbish piled high. Open sewers flowing everywhere you looked. After Arafat left, these camps were left with no protection. There is an old Lebanese proverb which says, “If you are a sheep among wolves you will be eaten.” The Israelis surrounded the camps but didn't enter, then the Phalangist militia came in trucks from where they were waiting at the airport. The Israelis gave them the job of what they called "searching and mopping up". They were in the camp for three days and they massacred all the men, women and children they could find. I heard from another doctor of the strange rumours that were going round but I didn't believe them. But we went to Shatila, got there just as the first journalists were arriving.

‘We saw the first dead in the entrance. It looked like a family who had tried to escape, the children still held in their parents' arms. We were doctors, we had to go on, but we never found a single life that could be saved. We were too late. Now I wish I'd never gone, never seen.' He stops, and I hear his feet shuffle in the dust, the rustle of his clothing.

‘Go on. Tell me what you found.'

‘Why do you want to know? There are only bad things to tell. What good will it do?'

‘Do you believe in spirits, Basif?'

‘
Spirits? I don't know.'

‘Unless you tell it, the spirits of those people will curse you.' I do not care what the words sound like or if he thinks I'm crazy. ‘Please, go on.'

There is only silence for a few seconds, and the sound of his breathing. ‘We found the bodies everywhere; on open ground, in the houses, the narrow alleyways. Piled on top of each other, twisted and stiffened into terrible shapes – for some had been dead for a couple of days. Some of the bodies were swollen and black and the smell was almost more than we could stand, and we couldn't speak because of the clouds of flies that gathered about our faces. I think they had grown so used to feasting on the dead that they didn't realize we were still alive. There were twenty, thirty bodies of young men with their hands and legs tied, lying at the base of a wall. Bodies of women and children covered by thin soil. Many had been shot but many had been killed by knives. At the start they used knives to stop the panic spreading too quickly, so as not to warn others. Babies, many babies and children, with their throats cut. Old women with single bullet wounds in their foreheads, shot at close range. They even killed the animals – we saw horses with their stomachs ripped open by bullets. The people who survived sat in the dust and held out their hands to us, but what could we give them? An old woman followed us, wailing, holding up a photograph of her family as if we might find them for her. Then more people arrived and the cameras came to show the world. Did you see it, Naomi?'

‘I saw some of the pictures. Before they showed it they said, “Some viewers might find these pictures disturbing,” and they showed a little. I only watched some of it, because I was frightened of what I would see.'

There is a sound that starts like a laugh but collapses into something else. ‘Maybe it's good not to see, Naomi.'

‘I don't think so, Basif. Not any more. The Israelis said they didn't see what was happening.'

‘
The Israelis heard it, Naomi, and watched it. There was a radio message to the Phalangists which they picked up. It said, "Do the will of God."'

‘How many were killed?'

‘So many we stopped counting. Later they said about a thousand. There were probably more, and ones who were never found. I knew many of them, recognized their faces. I had treated them in the clinic, especially the children.' His voice falters, breaks a little. ‘There was a young girl called Salah, ten years old. I had treated her a week before, put a dressing on her arm and told her that soon it would be better, that she would live to be a very old woman. I found her lying in a space between two houses. I think she had tried to hide. She was lying on her back and her eyes were open, looking up at me.' I hear him cry, a low broken sob followed by ragged breathing as if something is choking him. ‘I think as she looks at me that she's telling me I lied to her and I have to look away, try to hide the truth from her, that my brothers did this thing. And because of that, her blood, all their blood is on my hands.'